Brown is getting his day in the sun

He shows up for work in famously drab ties with his nails bitten to the quick. He hates networking, and didn’t marry until he was 49. He’s the glowering figure often seen harrumphing on the bench behind his preternaturally poised boss, Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the House of Commons.

You might say he’s the anti-Blair, in more ways than one.

The Shakespearean conflict that has been the brooding back story to Britain’s leadership ends today when Gordon Brown, the brilliant and somber treasury chancellor who has stood in Blair’s shadow for 13 years, becomes Britain’s 52nd prime minister.

As Blair submits his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II and Brown makes the long journey from No. 11 Downing St. to No. 10, the two political leaders not only pass the torch of government, but conclude a dramatic saga of intense friendship and rancorous rivalry that has afflicted both men and transformed the politics and economy of modern Britain.

“They were kind of like a couple who’ve been married for a long time. They got on each other’s nerves,” said a former Cabinet official who, like many interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. “They were highly interdependent. You look at their skill sets, they were completely different, and also completely complementary.”

Brown, 56, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, prizes prudence and duty in contrast to Blair’s uncanny zeitgeist vision and engaging style. He partnered with Blair in fashioning the Labor Party’s decisive return to power in 1997 -- and would have led the left-of-center party years ago had he not deferred to the more dynamic and electable Blair.

Promised the premiership after Blair had his turn, Brown has waited in growing frustration and resentment in recent years as his longtime friend found first one reason, then another, why it was not the right time to go.

The political marriage of two men seen as exceptional but antipodal political virtuosos paralyzed government when it was bad -- and it often was -- but its remarkable chemistry created the landmark reforms of New Labor and propelled Britain to an unmatched record of sustained economic growth.

“Gordon and Tony have had an intense relationship,” said a former Blair aide. “Mainly intensely good, sometimes intensely bad.”

Brown has run the treasury like a powerful fiefdom, giving himself final say on how much money ministers get in their budgets and often leaving Blair in the dark about the national budget’s final tax and spending figures until the last moment.

This was, say those close to them, a result of the famous power-sharing deal the two men cut at a London restaurant in 1994, when Brown agreed not to run for the Labor Party leadership. What he wanted in exchange, according to various reports, was not only the next shot at the top slot -- who knew it would take 13 years? -- but control over the economy and domestic spending issues in the meantime.

“The degree of control he had was unprecedented,” said Derek Scott, an advisor to former Chancellor Denis Healey who joined Blair’s team as top economic advisor.

“Whole discussions of pensions, social security -- ministers would find the budgetary decisions affecting their own departments would be occasionally taken out of their hands,” Scott said. “It was quite extraordinary. You had instances where ministers came to the view that it was more important to clear it with Gordon than clearing it with the prime minister.”

‘He thinks he’s smarter’

Brown’s reluctance to delegate is legendary and stems, many say, from his characteristic impatience.

“When you get to be prime minister, you can’t do everything. Therefore, you’ve got to trust and empower your colleagues more,” a former treasury official said. “But he thinks he’s smarter than they are, and he works harder than they do.”

Brown has always been intellectually intimidating. “He’s blind in one eye, and he reads everything. It’s really terrifying what he reads. Scary,” said Irwin Stelzer, a conservative at the Washington-based Hudson Institute who has known Brown for years. The two often find themselves on opposite sides of a debate.

Brown, who began as a brash and bookish young Scottish socialist, stuck closer to Labor’s traditional leftist ideals than Blair and never became the smooth politician that Blair is. He eschews white tie at his annual address to the captains of British industry at the Lord Mayor’s ceremonial house, a habit a Times of London columnist recently called “simply bloody rude.”

The floor of the study of his weekend home in Scotland is likely to be heaped chaotically with books; at European Council meetings, where networking is everything, Brown often arrives at the last minute, reorders the agenda so the items he’s interested in happen first, and catches an early plane home.

His conversation starters with friends are simple: “What are you reading?” is usually the first. Then, “Have you heard any good jokes?”

But his patience ends, many say, when the IQ at the other end of the conversation is found wanting. This is sometimes defined, those who don’t get along with him believe, by whether his interlocutor sees the wisdom of his views.

Ruth Lea, an economist and 16-year treasury employee who now directs the London-based Center for Policy Studies, said she found Brown “amazingly intolerant” when she expressed disagreement with him over his program of tax credits for working families.

“He blew up. He just lost his temper with me. And then tried to bludgeon me by loudly justifying his decision,” Lea said.

House full of books

Much of who he is, Brown often says, comes from his mother and his Church of Scotland minister father. They filled the house he grew up in with books, music and sports, and taught him the meaning of values such as courage, which stuck with him so much he recently published a book about it, examining the lives of such figures as Nelson Mandela, Robert Kennedy, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who led the Christian opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany.

“The word courage -- what’s fascinating is it was a very male term for centuries. The idea was there were these people of daring, of bravado, adventurers, people who were actually reckless,” he told an audience at the recent Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts.

“But actually when you look at people you admire for courage, what’s true about them, they weren’t fearless at all. They had fears, they worried about things, they were anxious, they were insecure. But what is true about them is that there was something more important than fear ... and it was the strength of belief.”

Brown’s own courage was tested at an early age, when he accelerated through school and entered Edinburgh University at the age of 16.

A rugby injury left him blind in one eye and locked in a darkened room for most of a year as doctors tried, with eventual success, to save the other eye. (He says he survived by listening to an audio book of Nicholas Monsarrat’s World War II naval classic, “The Cruel Sea.”)

Immersed in campus politics and studies of early socialists and the early 20th century Labor Party, Brown got a degree in history with exemplary first-class honors, and earned his doctorate with the beginnings of a scholarly biography on austere Scottish socialist James Maxton -- meticulously researched while Blair was at Oxford fronting a rock band.

The work, published years later, provided important clues to what would dominate Brown’s political thinking across a lifetime.

“For Maxton the only test of socialist progress was in the improvement of the individual and thus the community,” Brown wrote. “A truly socialist society would free men and women from the fear of poverty, the uncertainties of unemployment and the miseries of deprivation.”

After he graduated, Brown went to work at Scottish television before being elected to Parliament, as Blair was, in 1983.

Brown was quickly a rising star. And he found in Blair an enthusiastic intellectual partner in pulling the old trade union-dominated Labor Party into a new era of market principles and globalization. In the early days, Blair often deferred to Brown.

But that changed in 1994, when Blair apparently believed not only that he could beat Brown for the Labor leadership, but that he had the kind of appeal to vote-rich Middle England that the formidable Scot would never have.

Brown, by most accounts, eventually agreed that Blair was right. He deferred, his friends say, in the interest of the party.

He began waiting for his turn.

As time went on, Brown seemed to smile less and glare more. He underwent a personal trauma when he and his wife, public relations consultant Sarah Macaulay, lost their daughter Jennifer, who was born prematurely and died of a brain hemorrhage when she was 10 days old. The couple has since had two sons, one of whom has been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

“It is impossible to understand what that first child dying did,” Stelzer said. “You cannot begin to imagine what it was like for him. We were at the funeral. But you know, he’s overcome it.”

Blair and Brown, meanwhile, were getting along comfortably in public but often at loggerheads in private, not only over policy -- Brown imposed an impossible set of criteria for joining the euro currency zone, Blair wanted Britain fully in Europe -- but also by Blair’s continual foot-dragging over his departure.

Once it became clear that Blair intended to stand again in the 2001 election, Brown told him, “There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe,” biographer Robert Peston wrote in his book “Brown’s Britain.”

A mini-mutiny

There are differing reports over whether Brown engineered the mini-mutiny by Labor lawmakers last fall that ultimately forced Blair to announce his departure date. Nigel Griffiths, a longtime close friend, said Brown was “horrified” by the letter signed by the rebellious deputies demanding the prime minister’s departure and had no part in instigating it.

Still, one of the enduring images of those tumultuous days was of Brown leaving 10 Downing Street after a long, by all accounts tense, meeting with his old friend and ally in the midst of the political coup d’etat. He got into a waiting car, and then grinned broadly -- a rarely seen smile that looked like victory.

“I think it all hurt Gordon more than it helped him,” Stelzer said. “The picture of him coming out of Number 10 smiling is not one that he’s going to have in his photo album ... because people tolerate ambition, but not naked ambition.”

Brown’s closest friends say such assessments are a misreading of everything he is as a politician.

“Gordon coined the phrase ‘The reason we seek power is to give it back to the people,’ ” said Griffiths, who is a fellow member of Parliament from Edinburgh.

“He’s always been somebody, ever since I’ve known him, when he was 22, 23, he’s always been writing about change, always been writing about poverty, injustice both in this country and elsewhere. This is what motivates him.”

When asked recently at the Hay festival about political courage, Brown called up a story about the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was traveling to the United States for a meeting with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Reagan asked his aides, “ ‘Is this man a communist?’ ‘No, Mr. President, he’s an anti-communist.’ And the president said, ‘I don’t care what kind of communist he is,’ ” Brown related with a hearty laugh.

“Then Reagan asked Palme, he said, ‘What are you about? What do you believe? Do you want to abolish the rich?’ And Palme said, ‘No, I want to abolish the poor.’ ”

Brown ended the anecdote there, figuring he had made his point.

kim.murphy@latimes.com